NYT’s Brooks: Most Trump Picks Won’t ‘Want to Be Liked’ or Be ‘Responsible’

On Friday’s “PBS NewsHour,” New York Times columnist David Brooks said that “there are not going to be a lot of the Trump appointees like Jim Mattis, who want to be liked, who want to do a responsible job for the government.”

Brooks said, “These are anti-institutionalists. That’s the theme of the whole — the group of people. And so many have scandals because they are outside the pale of polite society. So, there are not going to be a lot of the Trump appointees like Jim Mattis, who want to be liked, who want to do a responsible job for the government. When you pick somebody who has a sex scandal or a financial scandal, they are totally on your side, because they have no other route to a career in their lives. So, they are going to be total Trump loyalists. And their mission is to disrupt the institutions.”

He continued, “Now, some of the — I happen to think a lot of our institutions need some disrupting. We’ve got a lot of, like, why can’t we make — why can’t we build subways in this country? Why can’t we build fighter planes in this country? A lot of these institutions have gone creaky. And so, they need reform, but they don’t need a blowtorch. And, especially in the attorney general’s office, what we’re talking about is not reforming the Justice Department. That’s not cleaning out the bureaucracy. That’s taking a blowtorch to the neutral institutions of justice.”

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